2001-04-29
Emil Brink
gentoo v0.11.16
INTRODUCTION
gentoo is a graphical file managment program, written from
scratch in C. It uses the GTK+ toolkit for its interface.
gentoo is developed and tested primarily under Linux, but is
known to compile and work on many other Unix-like operating
systems as well.
One of the design goals with gentoo has been to provide
extensive customization and configuration abilities, and to do
so from an integrated, graphic, interface. The user should not
have to edit the configuration file directly "by hand", and
especially not have to restart the program for changes to take
effect.
gentoo features a fairly complex and powerful system
for file type recognition, coupled to an object-oriented style
system, which together give you a lot of control over how files
of different types are displayed and acted upon.
LICENSE
This software is copyright (c) 1998-2001 by Emil Brink.
You are free to distribute this software under the terms
of the GNU General Public License, version 2. You should have
received a copy of this license together with the software (in a
file called COPYING). If not, and you have web access, check
<http://www.gnu.org>.
It is important to realize that this software comes
without any warranty whatsoever.
THE AUTHOR
gentoo was written by Emil Brink. It is my first program to use
GTK+, my first major Linux application, and my first program
released in source form under the GPL, but it's absolutely _not_
my first program. ;^) I've been hacking since the late eighties,
and am currently a studying for a Master of Science in computer
science at the Royal Institute of Technology ("RIoT") here in
Stockholm, Sweden.
Work on gentoo started in May 1998, when I decided it
would be fun to learn the GTK+ interface toolkit. The first
actual release of gentoo was called version 0.9.0, and made
its public appearance back in September 1998.
Please send questions, answers, bug reports, praise (?)
and critique straight to <emil@obsession.se>. I am listening.
Also, please do try to include the word "gentoo" in the subject
of your e-mail, to help me manage my e-mail.
RELEASE NOTES
Heh. I thought the time between 0.11.14 and 0.11.15, the two
previous releases, was long. Well, that record has not only
been broken, it's been crushed! :( Again, the main reason is
not boredom, but lack of time. Please swing by the site over at
<http://verse.sourceforge.net> if you're wondering what most of
my hacking goes into, these days...
This release adds nothing major in the user-visible
portions of gentoo. It does, however, fix a couple of minor
bugs and annoyances, and substantial amounts of internal code.
The first steps towards user-configurable menus have been taken,
but nothing is visible. It turns out that menu management and
editing are complex issues, that I need to spend more time on.
IMPORTANT NOTE
If you experience problems with shift-selecting, I recommend
that you investigate what version of the GTK+ toolkit you are
running. A good way to do this is to execute the gentoo command
"About", and read the number in the dialog that opens. Another
is to find a shell, and run the "gtk-config --version" command.
If you're running anything previous to GTK+ 1.2.3, you
should upgrade, as GTK+ 1.2.3 seems to fix the shift-selection
bug. The latest stable release of GTK+ is 1.2.10, which should
work just fine with gentoo (I've tried it).
FOR MORE INFORMATION...
* Information about system requirements and instructions about
how to build an executable are provided in the file INSTALL,
as usual.
* For (sometimes very technical and close-to-the-source) notes
on exactly what's happened in this release, check out the
FIXES-0.11 file. I recommend reading it on each new release.
* Details about gentoo's support for GUI customization through
the use of GTK+ RC files are in the README.gtkrc file.
* For information about known problems, quirks and general
developer headaches, please see the BUGS file.
* There is a TODO file, containing a few major things I have
planned/want to see implemented.
DOCUMENTATION
The documentation that is available is incomplete and sort of
out of date. I'm sorry about that. Hopefully, I will find the
time and energy in the future to do a complete rewrite of the
documentation, since much has changed and been added since it
was written.
There is a short manpage that touches the bare essentials,
in "docs/gentoo.1x". Please read it.
There is some reasonably modern documentation in plain
text format in some files in "docs/scratch/". Read those, too.
/Emil
